We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
I have a complaint about the media. First they make a bunch of films with the same stupid plot hole. I refer, of course, to the 1938 Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes, its 1979 and 2013 remakes, and several other movies inspired by it, such as Bunny Lake is Missing and Flightplan.
Then if that were not enough they try to run the same ridiculous “We can act like something whose existence is thunderingly obvious never existed at all and no one will notice” plotline past the public in the newspapers. I refer, of course, to the article by Oliver Moody that appeared in the Times on 6th February 2023. The headline is “Swedish police demand tools to fight ‘unprecedented’ gang crime” and the subheading is “Nation with peaceful reputation averaged one shooting or bombing a day last month”
Swedish police chiefs have warned that crime is hitting “extremely serious and unprecedented” levels after 19 shootings in Stockholm and the surrounding towns since Christmas.
Gun violence between gangs competing over the increasingly lucrative drugs trade has been rising since the turn of the millennium, culminating in a record 63 fatal shootings last year. The country also has the European Union’s highest numbers of drug offences, burglaries and thefts per head, according to the bloc’s statistics agency.
While the firearms murders were already the dominant issue at the general election last September, the concerns have worsened as several gang conflicts in the Stockholm region escalated over the past six weeks.
At least four teenagers and young men have been shot dead in the latest spate of violence. There was on average of one shooting or bombing a day in the area over the four weeks from December 25.
In the most recent incident an adult and two children were targeted at their flat in Arboga, 75 miles west of the capital. Their front door was peppered with bullets twice in the space of a week, although no one was hurt.
Ten police leaders including Anders Thornberg, head of the national police authority, said their agencies were under “historically high” strain. “Day and night our staff are working to deal with fatal shootings, bombings and other serious violent crimes,” they wrote in Dagens Nyheter newspaper.
“But despite this hard and determined work 24 hours a day, and despite the fact that police and prosecutors have never before deprived so many people of their liberty, the detention centres and prisons are full to bursting — more needs to be done.”
The senior police officers said crimes were harder to solve because victims and witnesses have become more reluctant to testify.
Gangs are believed to be hiring children as young as 13 or 14 to intimidate their rivals with gunshots or explosives. Thornberg and his colleagues said the investigations were getting “ever harder to deal with” because of the number of officials involved in youth cases.
The most recommended comment was by J Sture and said, “This article appears to be missing a crucial element. Are we to suppose that this rise in gang warfare and drugs is all to with the native Swedish population? Just asking…”. At the time of writing there are 137 comments to Oliver’s Moody’s article. By my reckoning around 120 of them mock the author for not mentioning that the gangs driving the unprecedented increase in Sweden’s crime rate are made up of Muslim immigrants or their immediate descendants.
Burying the lede can work as a strategy if no one even suspects there ever was a lede there in the first place. When people know damn well what is not being said, it has the opposite effect. This helps nobody and harms everybody, including Sweden’s Muslims. A problem that cannot be named cannot be solved.
“Islamophobia from the likes of Boris Johnson must be punished – and this is how to do it”, writes Dr Suriyah Bi in the Guardian.
How do we properly punish Islamophobes? As a lecturer in cultural geography at Oxford University, I have used my research skills to draw up an index of Islamophobia to help police, prosecutors, victims and analysts work out when to take legal action and how to map out the routes towards such action. Importantly, this is the first time an index to measure a hate crime has been proposed and it remains an open project. It is inspired by the way crimes such as domestic violence are processed, placing victim testimony and experience at the heart.
Published last week, this index of Islamophobia is accompanied by a pathways-to-prosecution form, which helps identify the laws breached and scores each hate crime on the basis of intensity, intention, impact and recklessness.
How might it work? Let’s look at some flagrant examples of Islamophobia, including Boris Johnson’s infamous comments on burqa-wearing Muslim women as “letterboxes”, the distribution of violence-inducing “Punish a Muslim Day” letters, a headscarf being torn from a Muslim woman, and being called Shamima Begum in the workplace.
The middle two of those would be crimes by any definition (incitement to violence and assault), and the final one is a verbal insult which should not be a crime but which would and should be considered unacceptable behaviour in any decent workplace.
The first one consisted of Boris Johnson making a less than reverential quip about the appearance of women wearing burkas in the process of defending their right to wear them.
When someone suffers from a fear of flying, the usual strategy to help them overcome it is to educate them about how planes work and how safe air travel is, combined with getting them to experience flight in a supportive and friendly environment, so that they can come to realise that their phobia is irrational.
Given that Dr Bi is a lecturer at Oxford, one would think that, as a Muslim herself and an educator at one of our most prominent universities, she would be ideally placed to advise and promote a similar strategy of education and familiarisation in order to dispel Islamophobia. However she appears to think that a strategy of punishment would be more effective.
I was going to stop there. Nice bit of snark, that. I could rely on the reader to supply the conclusion that the correlation between knowledge and fear of flying is negative while the correlation between knowledge and fear of Islam is positive because flying is actually safe while Islam is actually dangerous. But in the spirit of Chr…, er, “the holidays”, let’s look a little deeper.
→ Continue reading: “Islamophobia from the likes of Boris Johnson must be punished”
The great strength of these [Iranian] protests – the sudden, overwhelming way in which they have spread, fuelled by social media – could also be their undoing. As we saw so tragically in the wake of the Arab Spring, this new generation of leaderless, internet-based movements can lack the coordination, durability and ideological focus to topple the despotic leaders they rage against.
– Tom Slater
Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian Kurdish woman, was arrested by the morality police for having an improperly adjusted hijab. Witnesses say that she was beaten in the police van. Her relatives published pictures of her lying in a coma in intensive care. They wanted the world to know what had been done to her. She never woke from that coma.
Anything a social media company might do pales in comparison to the evil of beating a woman to death because she did not cover her hair in the approved way – but what Twitter did next is still worth noting.
Vahid Yücesoy reports,
I’ve just spoken to @AlinejadMasih. @Twitter chose to suspend her account because she shared the picture of #MahsaAmini, 22-year-old Iranian girl in coma after she was severely beaten by the hijab police and later died.
Alinejad Masih’s post was mass-reported by supporters and hirelings of the Iranian regime. The grounds for suspension of her account were that she had included an image of “graphic violence” in her tweet. The fact that it was a true image of Iranian government brutality that Mahsa Amini’s family wanted the world to see was ignored. This is how a system of pre-emptive censorship inevitably works.
(Via Jim Treacher.)
All twelve of the firefighters who were working in my husband’s firehouse died on 9/11. The “riding list,” handwritten in chalk, listing all the men who were on duty that day, still hangs on the firehouse wall, forever preserved in glass. Engine 40 Ladder 35 #NeverForget
– Janice Dean
Reporter #1: “Is the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?”
President Biden: “No. It is not. Because you have the Afghan troops have 300,000 – well-equipped- as well equipped as any army in the world – and an air force – against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable”
Reporter #2: “Mr President, thank you very much. Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.”
Pres. Biden: “That is not true.”
Reporter: “Is it – Can you please clarify what they have told you about whether that will happen or not.”
Pres. Biden: “That is not true. They did not reach that conclusion.”
Reporter: “So what is the level of confidence that they have that it will not collapse?”
Pres. Biden: “The Afghan government, the leadership, has to come together. They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.”
Reporter: “Do you see any parallels with this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam? With some people feeling…”
Pres. Biden: “None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy. Six if I’m not mistaken.”
“The Taliban is not the South – the North Vietnamese army. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
– President Joe Biden, press briefing, 8th July 2021. Kabul fell on 15th August.
From Guido Fawkes’ post of 16th August 2021, “Biden’s tragically optimistic Afghanistan press briefing shows lack of intelligence”
“What’s on your mind?” asks the WordPress dashboard at the top of the little box where you put your content. This. This is on my mind. Salman Rushdie getting stabbed. Back in the 1990s I bought a copy of The Satanic Verses as a contribution to his security costs. I’ve read it, and Midnight’s Children, and found them memorable but they were not books to which I wished to return. I thought all that stuff about the Iranian fatwa had faded away. I guess not.
Edit: “I’m literally a communist” Ash Sarkar sinks to the occasion:
Don’t have anything particularly clearheaded to say, but the stabbing of Salman Rushdie (though it has decades-old origins) alongside the campaign of threats and intimidation against drag queens in the US makes it feel like a very grim, dangerous time for artistic expression.
The president of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, offered his condolences over the massacre of worshippers at a church in Owo, Nigeria.
News Letter reports,
Forty people were killed in the attack at the Church of St Francis in the Owo district in the Ondo region of Nigeria on June 5. Over 126 people also suffered injuries following the attack.
In a statement last week, President Higgins appeared to link the attack with climate change.
His comments have drawn criticism from the bishop of the Catholic Ondo diocese, Jude Ayodeki Aroguande, who acknowledged and thanked the president for his condemnation but said the “incorrect and far-fetched” link drawn between the slaughter and climate change was “rubbing salt to the injuries of all who have suffered terrorism in Nigeria”.
In his statement, President Higgins had condemned those responsible for the attack and cautioned against “any attempt to scapegoat pastoral peoples who are among the foremost victims of the consequences of climate change”.
The Labour politician also called for solidarity with “all those impacted not only by this horrible event, but in the struggle by the most vulnerable, on whom the consequences of climate change have been inflicted”.
The former president of the United States, Barack Obama, offered his condolences over the massacre of children at a school in Uvalde, Texas.
The New York Post reports,
The former president shared the message on Twitter Wednesday in the wake of the massacre at Robb Elementary School that killed 19 children and two fourth-grade teachers.
“As we grieve the children of Uvalde today, we should take time to recognize that two years have passed since the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer.” Obama tweeted. “His killing stays with us all to this day, especially those who loved him.”
It is a film that is “more interesting on paper than in practice”, according to this review:
This British-made epic earns a significant accolade: it is the first film to put the “face” of the prophet Muhammad on screen. No single actor is credited with playing him, or any of the other holy figures in his entourage. And, as a nervous initial disclaimer points out, their faces, often shown in dazzling sunbursts, are computer-generated. Presumably, this is enough to placate Islam’s prohibition on visual representation of the prophet, but this is a Shia-aligned film that is evidently a little more lenient on the issue.
The Guardian‘s reviewer underestimated the interest that the film would generate. UK cinema chain cancels screenings of ‘blasphemous’ film after protests, the same newspaper reports today.
Paul Embery tweets, “This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a “blasphemous” film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Idrissa Gueye is a Senegalese footballer who plays for his country and for the French side Paris Saint-Germain.
On Sunday 15th May, Paris Saint-Germain played Montpellier. On that day, players in the French Ligue 1 were meant to wear football jerseys with the numbers in LGBT rainbow colours in order to commemorate the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia. Unexpectedly, Mr Gueye did not play in that match. So far as I can find out with my limited ability to search news reports in French, he has not said why he sat out the match, but it is widely believed that it was because he felt that it would be incompatible with his religious beliefs to wear a shirt in Pride colours. He is a practising Muslim.
Via Paul Embery, I found this quotation from a letter that the FFF (Fédération Française de Football / French Football Federation) sent to Mr Gueye on May 17th:
“There are two possibilities, either these allegations are unfounded and we invite you to speak out without delay to silence these rumours. For example, we invite you to accompany your message by a photo of yourself wearing said shirt.”
“Or the rumours are true. In this case we invite you to realise the impact of your act, and the grave error committed. The fight against discrimination towards different minorities, whoever they might be, is a vital fight for all times. Whether it’s skin colour, religion, sexual orientation, or any other difference, all discrimination is based on the same principle which is rejection of the other because they are different from the majority.”
“By refusing to take part in this collective operation, you are effectively validating discriminatory behaviour, and rejection of the other, and not just against the LGBTQI+ community. The impact of football on society and the capacity for footballers to be a role model for those who admire them gives us all a particular responsibility.”
The report and translation come from the website Get French Football News. It says that it is quoting a story from the French sports paper L’Equipe. I believe the original L’Equipe story is this: “Le Conseil national de l’éthique de la FFF a écrit à Idrissa Gueye (PSG)” The headline means, “The National Ethics Council of the FFF has written to Idrissa Gueye (PSG)”.
One does not have to share Mr Gueye’s religious beliefs, or his (probable) opinions on LGBT issues, to see something sinister in this demand that he make a display of loyalty to prove his “innocence” of a charge that he did not participate in what is effectively the visual equivalent of compelled speech.
Why do they bother? They say Gueye must get himself photographed in a rainbow shirt because he’s a footballer and thus allegedly a role model. But such gestures of solidarity are inspiring only if they are known to be sincere. No one is going to be inspired to rethink their prejudices regarding gay people if and when Idrissa makes some obviously reluctant gesture of support.
The controversy on Will Smith hitting Chris Rock after the latter made a distasteful joke about his wife’s hair loss is interesting because it cuts across party lines. Though most politicians have made statements disapproving of Smith, some traditional conservatives and radical left wingers have both spoken in support of him. To take but two of many examples:
– Representative Ayanna Pressley (D) said, in a now deleted tweet “#Alopecia nation stand up! Thank you #WillSmith Shout out to all the husbands who defend their wives living with alopecia in the face of daily ignorance & insults.”
– Simon Hoare MP (C) said, “I’d just hope if someone thought it in good taste to make a joke at the expense of a medical condition of my wife then I’d get up and lamp him.”
Me, I support Rock. His joke was cruel. Smith had a right to be angry. But I would rather not set the precedent – or rather go back to the precedent – that words justify violence. For why, see the title of this post.
“Four people killed in Israeli stabbing attack”, reports the Times:
At least four people were stabbed to death in southern Israel today before the attacker was shot dead by a passerby, in one of the deadliest such attacks in the country in years.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack in Beersheba, the largest city in the Negev desert. Israeli media reports identified the attacker as an Arab citizen of Israel, who is claimed to be a former high school teacher who had previously been imprisoned over alleged links to the Islamic State.
“It appeared to be a single terrorist who went on a stabbing spree,” Eli Levy, a police spokesman, said on Channel 13 TV. “A civilian took the initiative and shot and killed him.”
The presence of that armed civilian saved many innocent lives.
If a similar Islamist or other terrorist stabbing spree were to happen here in the UK tomorrow – and who is to say that it will not – then the odds for the defenders are much worse. If they are lucky there might be something like a narwhal tusk handy. If not… I have often thought of the brave last moments of Ignacio Echeverria:
At around 10pm on Saturday 3 June 2017, Echeverría, carrying his skateboard on his back, was skateboarding with friends in London. Near Borough Market, they saw a man attacking a police officer lying on the ground. When the man left the body of the officer and began to assault a woman (a French citizen who survived the incident due to Echeverría’s actions) Echeverría used his skateboard to strike the attacker, diverting his attention long enough that several people were moved to safety. He subsequently attacked a second terrorist who was also attacking a police officer. He was then stabbed twice in the back by two attackers, causing his death.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
